This
is getting weird, because I know what that means now. What's happening to me?

NARRATOR: Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives,
right now on NOVA.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the
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MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Hello. Nice to see you.

NARRATOR: Mark Oliver Everett, known to his friends as E,
is the creative force behind the Eels, an alternative rock band...

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT (Singing): there's nothing
that i wanna do

NARRATOR: ...whose songs have earned a shelf full of music
awards and even popped up in the Shrek movies.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT (Singing): trouble with
dreams is they don't come true
and when they do they can't catch up to you

NARRATOR: But many of Mark's fans don't know that his
father, Hugh Everett, is also a cult figure—in the world of
physics—for pioneering the strange theory of parallel universes.

Hugh
Everett proposed a multitude of universes, each a home to an alternate reality,
including alternate versions of you and me. It may sound crazy, but the theory
of parallel universes is now considered serious science, and Hugh Everett is,
to some, an icon.

But
to his son Mark, he has always been an enigma.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: I don't remember knowing,
when he was alive, that he was, like, a famous physicist. I don't know if I
ever even knew that until after he'd died.

Dad,
Mom, can you hear me?

Here's
my mom. This is the one. I've never seen it before. Oh, there's one for my sister, too. I've
never seen that. Wait, where's the, where's my father's stone? I just don't get
it, it's a mystery.

NARRATOR: Mark's
father was a distracted genius, lost in his own world. They lived in the same house for 20
years, yet they barely spoke. For Mark, one of their most memorable encounters came in July,
1982.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: It was the weirdest thing,
because I walked in their bedroom and there he was, laying there, like,
sideways on the bed, fully clothed, with his tie on, like he always had on, you
know. I tried to wake him up. When I put my arms under him, and I picked him
up, his body was completely stiff. And it was just so surreal, because I was
touching him which was the only time I could remember having any physical
contact with him. Yeah, and it was just so also so, obviously, it was, you
know, very traumatic and a horrific scene. But it was also...had the added
surreal quality for me, because, you know, my father had just died, but I, you
know, I barely knew him. So it was hard to know how to feel like a normal
person would feel in that situation. So I guess it's pretty sad that I had, you
know...the one really
intimate experience I had with him was while he was dead, you know.

(Singing): i don't leave the house much
i don't like being around people
it's better for me to stay home
some might think it means i hate people
but that's not quite right

NARRATOR: Mark fiercely guards his privacy, but now he's
decided to take a journey to try to understand his father and the bizarre
theory he dreamed up.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: I'm going to go on this
trip, because it's something that I knew was coming, eventually. I didn't want
to wait too long either, you know, with my family history, the longevity rate
there. Well, you have to have a sense of humor. You know, that came from my
family. That was the way we communicated, like nobody said, "I love you," or
anything like that. It was more, it was more, it was a very kind of jokey,
sarcastic family, and that was how we communicated, you know.

Oh,
what do we got here? This is Bobby's room. I mean how many dogs get their own
room? He's the most spoiled dog in Los Feliz, maybe in the world.

NARRATOR: Understanding how his father came up with the
idea of parallel universes is going to be tricky, because science was never
Mark's strong point.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: I only have a very, very
vague understanding of my father's theory. It gets up to a certain point and it
becomes, like, impenetrable. And then it gets into the scientist language,
which is like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah." It's like a different alphabet they're
using, practically.

NARRATOR: Hugh Everett's theory was so bold, that it set
him on a collision course with the most brilliant minds of the physics world.

Taken
to the extreme, parallel universes would mean that with every event that could
happen in more ways than one, universes branch off in different directions.
That means that, moment to moment, we divide into multiple versions of
ourselves.

Applying
the theory to Mark, he splits in two at the very moment he decides to go on his trip. In another
parallel universe, a version of himself stays at
home in L.A., while in this universe, Mark sets off.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT (Singing):blinking
lights on the airplane wings
up above the trees
set me on the ground
once more again

NARRATOR: Like his father, Mark grew up just outside
Washington, D.C. Still living in the area is physicist Don Reisler, a work colleague and friend of his
father's.

DON REISLER: Hello, Mark!

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: You dressed for
me.

DON
REISLER: Absolutely! Who could turn down this opportunity? I mean, how often does a rock star come to my house?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: It's good to see
you; my goodness.

DON REISLER: Hey, it's
delightful to see you.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: How long has it
been? Twenty-five years?

DON REISLER: Twenty-five years.

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: Wow.

DON REISLER: You are now so old that you are the age I was when
you last saw me.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Really? Wow. You guys are
always doing the math.

DON
REISLER: Always doing strange stuff, yeah. So, come in and be
comfortable: bathroom there if you need, fluids here. We can sit down.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Great.

When
did you first meet my father?

DON
REISLER: 1970. It was a job interview.
And he very timidly—I
know that's not what you think of —but very, very timidly
said, "Have you, by any chance, seen
my paper on quantum
mechanics?"

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: Mmm, that day?

DON REISLER: That day, yeah. And I said, "Oh my god, you're that
Hugh Everett?" Because I had seen it and thought it was
the work of a raving lunatic. And told him!

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: You said that?

DON
REISLER: And so, and he thought it was funny. And so we knew
we could enjoy each other.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Wow. Even
though he was a constant physical presence, he is really a complete mystery, as
a person, to me. What was he like? You know, that's what I don't really
know.

DON
REISLER: He was peculiar and a bit eccentric. He was a very
good friend to me, in his way. Yeah, I will show you something, that friendship
and contrast.

You
have here...

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Wow, he is outside.

DON REISLER: This would have
been late '70s.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: That's basically
what he was wearing every day and every night at the dining room table, as
well, that was his uniform.

The
only thing you guys
have in common is facial hair.

DON REISLER: Yeah.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: And otherwise,
you look like completely different, you know...

DON REISLER: Species.

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: Like city guy and
mountain guy.

DON REISLER: And yet, we were really good friends.

NARRATOR: Don is an expert in quantum mechanics, the laws
that govern the tiniest particles. To start Mark out nice and easy, all Don
needs is a pencil.

DON
REISLER: If I take a pencil, and I cut it in half and cut it in half and cut it in half, and just get ever,
ever smaller pieces, at some point I may run out of something I can cut in half. You've
gotten to the point where
the pencil no longer can be subdivided. You've come to something that's
no longer bits of a pencil, but is something more fundamental, and that was
the notion of an atom.

NARRATOR: Atoms are the buildings blocks of the universe,
tiny particles that make up everything we see around us, from houses and
guitars to rock musicians. They're so small that there are more atoms in a
period than there are pencils in the whole world.

If
you could somehow look inside one of these atoms you might
see what it's made of.
In the middle is a concentrated ball of material called the nucleus. Around
the nucleus are tiny particles called electrons. These electrons spin super-quick
around the nucleus.

Now—this
is the crazy part—the classical laws of physics seem to
work fine for everything
much bigger than an atom. For instance, Newton's gravity makes apples go down
rather than up, and at an intuitive level, these classical laws make
perfect sense.

But when it comes to really tiny stuff, like atoms, the classical laws break down.
The electrons don't fly around the nucleus
in nice regular orbits like
planets around the Sun, but instead they are smeared out, taking on a cloud-like
form. And even weirder still, they are everywhere at once. Welcome to the
quantum world.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: What do you think about
this?
You know, my father, clearly, on top of his game with the
mathematics and whatnot, and I...the farthest I got was I flunked out of the
easiest 9th grade
algebra class. I just couldn't grasp it.

DON REISLER: Right.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: I just didn't inherit that
gene.

DON
REISLER: Yeah. I've thought a lot about that.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: About how stupid I was in
math?

DON
REISLER: I think I'd have phrased it differently.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Did...maybe my father
spoke of it?

DON REISLER: No, no. I mean...

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: What a
disappointment I was?

DON REISLER: No. I think, if
your father had had the emotional vocabulary, he'd have been very,
very pleased with what you did with your music.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT (Singing): feel like an old railroad man
ridin' out on the bluemont line
hummin' along old dominion blues
not much to see and not much left to lose
and i know i can walk along the tracks
it may take a little longer but i'll know
how to find my way back

NARRATOR: Hugh Everett applied to
graduate school at Princeton, wanting to be close to his hero,
Albert Einstein. A glowing reference from Hugh's undergraduate professor
confirms that he was already seen as unusually gifted.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: It says, "This is once in
a lifetime recommendation, where I
think it most unlikely that I shall ever again encounter a student I can give
such complete and unreserved support."

Yeah
that sounds like a ringing endorsement.

NARRATOR: Hugh arrived at Princeton, in
1953, at the age of 22. After a year studying math, he was persuaded to switch to the far more glamorous quantum mechanics. The man who was the catalyst was Professor John Wheeler,
his new mentor. Wheeler was keen on a particular experiment.

It's
called the "double slit" experiment, and physics professors
love it, because it's the perfect way to demonstrate the weird quantum behavior
of tiny particles.

RICHARD
FEYNMAN (Physicist, Archival Footage)
I'm going to tell you what nature behaves like, and if you will simply admit
that maybe she behaves like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing
thing. So, that's the way to look at the lectures, not to try and understand. I
think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

NARRATOR: Here at Princeton, Mark is going to be shown the double slit experiment by laboratory demonstrator Ye Ma.

YE
MA (Princeton
University): You made it,
huh?

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: I made it.

YE MA: Alright, so you want to see this experiment?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah, Lay it on
me.

YE MA: Ok, so let's...

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: See if you can
make me understand quantum physics.

YE MA: It's a challenge,
but I accept it. Okay, what we have here is a black box, but inside it's rather simple.
Here is a laser.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Is this laser
going to blow my eyes out or anything?

YE MA: No, they are very...

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: I went to a Who
concert in seventh grade and the laser when right in my eyes, and I've had to wear glasses ever since.

YE
MA: I see. Usually, we don't see the laser beam in the
air, so we have a way of showing it. You see that?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Oh. There it is.

NARRATOR: The laser beam is made up of tiny particles of
light called photons. Photons behave similarly to electrons, but because we can
actually see photons as light, they're ideal for this experiment.

The
laser beam is filtered so single photons fire off one at a time. The individual
particles then arrive at a plastic barrier with two narrow slits. On the other
side is a sensitive camera to show where the photons end up.

YE
MA: What do you expect? You expect will hit two spot
here like that, or you expect the photon will go all over the map? What do you
expect? We have two slits here.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: The choices are all over
the map or...

YE
MA: Just two spots.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Just the two spots?

NARRATOR: Exactly. Mark is using his common sense. Imagine
this experiment was blown up to a much larger scale, so that the particles are
tennis balls. And a machine is firing the tennis balls at a barrier with two
gaps in it. Of course, you'd expect to find the balls hitting the back wall in
two places in line with the two slits. But when our experiment is done with
individual photons from the laser, something very different happens.

YE
MA: Okay, you see screen up there?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Yup.

YE
MA: That's what we see from the camera. See those
individual flashes?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

YE
MA: Those are the photons.

NARRATOR: Each flash of light is actually an individual
photon hitting the back wall. They appear to be landing all over the place. But
watch over time and a pattern emerges.

YE
MA: Can you see somewhere in the middle of the screen?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: It looks
like a smudge.

YE MA: Yeah, it looks like smudge. Those are the
photon...where the photon hits, but it's not two as we would expect. Is that
weird?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yes. So why is
that?

YE MA: That's right, why
is that?

NARRATOR: Instead of the two bands that
you'd expect, a series of smudges appears. It turns out that some photons land in a
place on the back wall that would be physically impossible if they had traveled straight through just one of the slits.

So,
on the quantum level, particles like photons don't always act like tennis
balls. Instead, the pattern of photons matches what you'd get if you sent waves
of water through the slits. It looks as if, while it's traveling, each photon
spreads out into a wave, passes through both slits, then interferes with itself
on the way to the back wall, where once again it acts like a particle, showing
up in just one spot.

Could
this mean that, as it travels, the photon goes through both slits? That it's in
two places at once?

NARRATOR: And it's not just photons that
behave like this. The double slit experiment has been replicated with electrons and with atoms.
So you might wonder, if we are made up of atoms, and if atoms could be
in two places at the same time, why couldn't we?

One
man thought he had the answer, the godfather of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr. He'd
won the Nobel Prize for his research into the atom. By the 1950s, Bohr had replaced
Einstein as the giant of the physics world.

a student to challenge
him, he'd have to be very naive or very arrogant. It
could be argued that Hugh Everett was both.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: You had to wear,
at dinner you had to wear the gowns?

CHARLES
MISNER: We had
to wear the gowns. You had to wear dinner gowns. There was a big fight about
them.

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: Lucky you didn't
have to wear the powdered wigs.

HARVEY J. ARNOLD (Everett's classmate): They were also
convenient for the occasional sneaking in of a female, such as it was.

MARK OLIVER
EVERETT: So what's going
on here? Bohr has come to give a lecture?

CHARLES
MISNER: Yeah, he'd come to give a lecture.
So this is where talks would be given. This would be the place where Bohr would've
given his talk that evening, where we had the photograph from.

HARVEY ARNOLD: I was sitting over
in, I think, a soft seat here, and Bohr was sitting about here, and I
was just snoring over in the corner.

NARRATOR: If Hugh's old pal Harvey had
managed to stay awake,
he may have heard "the world according to Bohr." Bohr
proposed that everything be divided into two categories. Big stuff—like tennis balls, apples falling off trees—obeys the classical laws of physics; however,
small stuff—about the size of atoms—obeys the crazy laws
of quantum mechanics.

Bohr
didn't stop there. He described what happens when you look at
something very tiny. At that exact moment, the particle stops
behaving so weirdly.
Instead of being in a
smeared out wave—in many places at once—when observed, it's in
just one place. It's now a nice well-behaved little particle.

The
whole shebang was called the "Copenhagen Interpretation," and thanks to Bohr, became
the established view. Oh, by the way, Copenhagen was Bohr's hometown.

But
the young and ambitious Hugh thought it was all most
unlikely. How can
just looking at something affect its behavior? Hugh was convinced that Bohr had it all wrong, and so
he decided to start on his own radical theory, helped, on most
evenings, by a sherry or two.

CHARLES MISNER: Harvey?

HARVEY ARNOLD: Yes, please.

HALE
TROTTER: For a while we had fairly regular sherry meetings
before dinner, very cheap sherry.

Toast
to Hugh.

CHARLES MISNER: Hugh, yeah, great.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Which room was my dad's?

HALE TROTTER: It's the room up
there with the open window.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Wow, that's,
like, the penthouse. Did they put the smartest guys up at
the top? Is that how it works?

HALE
TROTTER: Yeah, probably.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Is that the room
where he wrote his theory?

HALE
TROTTER: Yeah, it must have been.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Wow, that's pretty
exciting. So what year would this have been, when you lived here?

HARVEY ARNOLD: '53?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: 1953?

CHARLES MISNER: Yeah, '53 to '54.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Let's come into my father's
bedroom. So if you lay in the bed in this room, it's said that you will
come up with crazy theories. This is exciting, like, in the music world, this
would be like going to the Abbey Road Studios or something.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Interestingly enough, I didn't inherit any of his
mathematical genius. I have trouble adding up the tip at
dinner.

HALE TROTTER: I wonder what you feel you understand about your father's theory?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: I understand that up to the point of "anything that can be happening is happening somewhere." The somewhere part is the
hard part to wrap my brain around, you know?

I
feel like I'm in a science show now.

NARRATOR: A meeting with Max Tegmark, an astrophysicist and
a big fan of Hugh's theory, is set to bend Mark's brain further out of shape.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Hi.

MAX
TEGMARK: Hey. I'm Max.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Nice to meet you.

MAX
TEGMARK: It is a real honor to get to meet you because your
dad has been such an inspiration to me. When I was a grad
student, in Berkeley, I found, in this old bookstore, a copy of this 137-page paper that your dad wrote,
and I was like, wow, it suddenly all made sense. And since then, I've spent many years working on your dad's theory
and various implications of it.

NARRATOR: Mark's father
wasn't the only one who found Bohr's theory difficult to swallow. So did the
physicist Erwin Schroedinger#246;dinger.

MAX TEGMARK: As Schrödinger
himself pointed out in a famous article, that there is
something really weird about this idea of
dividing the world into two parts, because, you know, you are made out
of atoms, so if an atom can be in two places at once, so can you,
right?

NARRATOR: Schrödinger
had devised an experiment to expose this absurdity. He came up with the most
famous feline experiment in science, "Schrödinger's cat."

It
goes like this: A cat is penned up in a steel chamber along with a radioactive
substance such as uranium, a Geiger counter attached to a quick-release hammer,
and a flask of poison gas, hydrocyanic acid.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: No!

MAX TEGMARK: Yeah.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: He doesn't even
have legs and now you're going to poison him.

MAX TEGMARK: Don't blame me, blame Schrödinger.

NARRATOR: Schrödinger was never diabolical enough to do
this for real, it was just a thought experiment.

At
the heart of it all is a quantum event. Every now and then, completely
randomly, there's a chance of a uranium atom decaying and emitting radiation.
This radiation is enough to trigger the counter that sets off the hammer that
breaks the vial that poisons the cat. But if none of the uranium atoms decay
over the duration of the experiment, the cat will live.

MAX
TEGMARK: What's so disturbing about this is the fate of a
single atom, right, determines the fate of a cat.

NARRATOR: According to the Copenhagen Interpretation, until the
experiment is observed by peering inside, the entire contents
of the box exist in two possible states. Each uranium
atom both has and has not decayed.
And still further, the poisonous gas has both
killed and not killed the cat. And this is the paradox: a single cat that is
both dead and alive at the same time. That's what Schrödinger couldn't
buy and neither could Hugh.

In
the winter of 1954, sometime after the Bohr lecture, fortified by some
sherry and a chat with Bohr's assistant Aage
Petersen, Hugh came up with the theory of parallel universes.

Hugh
argued that everything in the universe, big and small, obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. And instead of the observer, Hugh introduced the
notion of splitting. Splitting occurs every time a quantum event happens, and this is how parallel universes
are created.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: How does my
father's theory solve the two different outcomes of the cat experiment?

MAX TEGMARK: It says that
both outcomes actually happen.

NARRATOR: The paradox had been that the one cat was both dead and alive at the same time. Hugh solved the problem with
parallel universes: two cats existing in separate worlds, one cat dead,
the other alive.

Hugh's
bold theory was backed up by some serious math. He was only 24
years old.

MARK EVERETT OLIVER (Singing):some people think you have a problem
but that problem lies only with them
beautiful freak, beautiful freak

NARRATOR: Today, Hugh's
ideas remain controversial, though a few physicists, like Max, see Hugh Everett
as a visionary.

MAX TEGMARK: In my personal
opinion, your dad's theory is...was one of the most
important discoveries of all time in science. I just can't
emphasize enough how important I think it is.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: I'm starting to
understand a lot more now; just need to come out here into
the nice Princeton air and shake, shake my head a little,
and let it all settle; talk to the squirrels.

So,
if one squirrel gets the decayed poison and the other squirrel gets
the non-decayed poison...now there's three of them. Now I'm really
confused.

Here we go!

(Singing) walk
myself down sycamore street
the sun beats down
no shoes on my feet

(Speaking) Don't
use that.

(Singing) a
daisy through concrete
a daisy through concrete

DANIEL J.
LINKE: (Archivist, Princeton University): So this is the
archives of Princeton University, itself. Over 250 years of the institution's
documents are here, and, of course, every dissertation that's been
produced, starting in the 1870s, including your father's 1957
dissertation, which is right down here. So...

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: On the Foundations
of Quantum Mechanics. Haven't heard that title before? "Recommended for acceptance by the Department of Physics.
March, 1957."

So,
this is the opening of the theory, and I actually, the
crazy thing is I actually
understand it.

"Quantum
mechanics is reformulated in a way which eliminates its
present dependence on the
special treatment of observations of a system by external
observer."

This
is getting weird, because I know what that means now. What's happening to me?

NARRATOR: What Hugh had
done was explain the paradoxes of quantum mechanics in a whole new way, taking
out the need for an observer that Bohr
had so relied on.

With
the hubris of youth, Hugh hoped that Bohr would recognize his
parallel universe theory as a breakthrough, a validation of his genius.

NARRATOR: In
the spring of 1959, Hugh Everett traveled with his wife,
Nancy, and young daughter, Liz, to Copenhagen. Hugh's mentor, John Wheeler, had arranged a
meeting between his student and Bohr.

CHARLIE MISNER (University of
Maryland): This is a view from across the street of the Bohr
Institute, as it was when your father was there talking with Bohr.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Oh, so that's
where it happened?

CHARLIE MISNER: That's where it
happened, yeah.

NARRATOR: Hugh's old
college friend Charlie Misner and his wife Susanne were in Copenhagen at the
time, and Charlie witnessed the whole thing.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: What happened when my father presented his theory to Bohr?

CHARLIE
MISNER: Well, Bohr was
deeply
involved for decades with a view of quantum mechanics that
he had developed and was essentially totally accepted
throughout the world of thousands of physicists doing it every day.

Each
of them was sure that they had gone over all this in
their own minds, and they knew exactly what was the right way to
think about it. And it was very hard to find a way to arrange a
meeting of the minds.

NARRATOR: The debate went nowhere. Bohr's position remained
unchanged, and without his blessing, Hugh's idea was ignored. Like Bohr, many
physicists, then and now, discount Hugh's theory. For them, the equations of
quantum mechanics work so well, the whole issue is beside the point.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: It must have
been incredibly
frustrating to feel like he'd come up with something so
groundbreaking and then just have it brushed under the rug.

SUSANNE
MISNER (Charlie Misner's
Wife): Oh, yeah. It was very sad. He was always joking when we
were around, but I sense the joking was
like the clown jokes.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: The tears of a
clown?

SUSANNE MISNER: Yeah.

CHARLIE MISNER: That's certainly
possible.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: To me it sort of
made sense why he was this kind of isolated presence in the house all those years, just sitting there and not
really saying much.

CHARLIE
MISNER: I see.

SUSANNE
MISNER: Oh, is that right? Well, I sensed he was not
really happy.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah, I think he
was definitely depressed.

SUSANNE MISNER: Your...his mother was somewhat bipolar, wasn't she?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah, she spent
time in mental hospitals and...

SUSANNE
MISNER: And what about your sister?

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: And my sister, yeah.

SUSANNE
MISNER: Was she having
also depressions?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah, severe.

SUSANNE
MISNER: So, I think I
was...I could sense that Hugh was...

CHARLIE MISNER: Yes, oh, you're
no doubt right.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: There is a little strain of crazy in the family.

SUSANNE
MISNER: Well we have it
in
our family. My sister committed
suicide, and Liz also took her own life.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah. You know, when Liz committed suicide, in her suicide note she wrote that she was going off to
meet our father in a parallel universe.

SUSANNE MISNER: She was a very
intelligent girl.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah.

SUSANNE MISNER: So it was very
sad.

NARRATOR: With a family
history of depression, Hugh took the rejection of his theory hard and soon left
academia for good.

To
the me that split off and didn't come on this trip—you
lazy sack o'—because
I mean, I really feel propelled by the sadness of the tragedy of my father not getting
the recognition he deserved, because he was just too far
ahead of his time, maybe too smart too soon.

Being
too smart too soon, he didn't really get a chance to pursue more, I think,
because he just felt like, you know, "What's the point
if no one's
going to listen to me?"

I
am getting more comfortable with who my father is. The
more I'm learning about him, the more I am getting to know him, the more
I like him, you know? I know he, he seems like a
good guy, to me, overall. He had his problems, obviously. Tried
pretty hard in his own weird way. He has already done more than I
have done, in terms of being a father, so, you know, you've got to
give him that much.

He
let me play drums in the house. That's my train.
I've got to go: on to the next fantastic voyage into my father's brain. Got to
go.

My father died
when I was 19. My sister died several years later, and my mom
died soon after she did. And at that point, I had to go out and clean out the family house.

I
boxed up a whole bunch of stuff of my father's. It's all been
sitting under my house all these years, and I haven't
ever looked at any of it. And, you know, it's a painful, painful world to open
up.

NARRATOR: For Hugh Everett's biographer, Peter Byrne, this
is an eagerly anticipated scientific gold mine, but it
could also provide Mark with some new clues about his father.

That's
a really good photo, man.
He
looks, like, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: That didn't last
long...didn't...and then no one took him seriously, and he lost the
fire in his eyes.

PETER
BYRNE: Well, yeah. I mean how you would
you like to invent like one of the coolest things of all time
and have people go "uhhh?"

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Happens every
time I put an album out.

PETER BYRNE: Oh yeah, oh
yeah, definitely!

Cool!
This looks like tapes.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Ooh, tapes.

PETER BYRNE: Who knows what's
on there, man. That's going to be amazing to listen to that, 'cause who knows
what's on there.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: The bad news is
that I remember dropping his Dictaphone in the tub once, when I was a kid, and
ruining it. But hopefully that's not the same one that I ruined.

I
don't know if I would recognize his voice, to be honest with
you, because besides
the fact that it's been 25 years since he died, I didn't hear him speak
much in the 18 years or 19 years I lived in the house with him. So
it would probably sound weird to me, to hear his voice.

PETER
BYRNE: Oh, there you go.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Let's see if it
works.

That
didn't sound good. This might be the one I dropped in the tub, when I was a
kid.

PETER BYRNE: Tapes.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: That's true, so,
they must be...

NARRATOR: Archive material of Hugh is
surprisingly scarce. There are very few photographs of him and no known film footage. These
Dictaphone tapes
might be the only recording ever made of Hugh's voice.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Think we're out
of
luck on this for today. Alright, I'll get my people on this.

PETER BYRNE: Okay.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: One of my
roadies can probably figure this one out.

PETER BYRNE: There's
universes in which it worked, you know?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT (Singing): Hey,
man. What? Dig this. The world is going to end tomorrow. Hey, buddy, got a
nickel I can borrow? This rotten world's going to chew you up.

NARRATOR: The late
1950s were the height of the Cold War. Disappointed and disillusioned with
academia, Hugh went to work as a military analyst.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Going to the
Pentagon, which I, again, never saw myself going to in my lifetime. I don't
think I've ever been there, I don't think Dad ever took me there for Daddy-Son
work day.

NARRATOR: At the
Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, Hugh could defer the draft and earn a good
salary.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: How the hell did
I get clearance? Amazing! I am standing here where Generals make speeches. What kind of kooky world is this? But also, it
makes you ask, "How good is the security?" if they let me in here, you know,
because I'm loco. Right, back to business.
First question: A.B.C.

NARRATOR: One of Hugh's
Pentagon assignments was "The
Radioactive Fallout Project," which analyzed the chilling effects of nuclear war
between The Soviet Union and the US.

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Hi. George?

GEORGE
PUGH (Nuclear
Physicist): Oh, hi!

MARK
OLIVER EVERETT: Hi. Long time,
no see.

NARRATOR: Hugh's colleague on this project was nuclear physicist
George Pugh.

GEORGE
PUGH: I think the last time I remember really meeting you, at the time, you were busy getting better and better playing
the drums.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: That's right.

NARRATOR: Based on their research, according to George, he
and Hugh warned President
Eisenhower that the military had completely underestimated the global devastation of nuclear war.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Do you think my father ever had any moral issues
working for the government?
You weren't a couple of trigger happy guys with the fate of the world at your hands?

GEORGE PUGH: No. After we
briefed Eisenhower, there was a gradual shift in U.S. policy not to build so many
twenty-megaton weapons as they were doing, and for God's sake, not to go to a-hundred-megaton weapons, which
they never did.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: So, you guys really made a positive difference in
the world?

GEORGE PUGH: I think we
really did, yeah.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah.

GEORGE PUGH: It was as darn
good thing somebody did what we did.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Yeah, I'll say.

NARRATOR: After Hugh left the weapons group, in 1964, he
went into business developing computerized nuclear war games for the military
and was pretty successful. But in
May, 1977, Hugh got a pleasant surprise.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT (singing)
: Today is a lovely day to run. Start up the car with
the sun.

NARRATOR: The University
of Texas invited him to speak at a physics conference, so he packed up the
family and drove to Austin.

Hugh's
theory had started to be referenced in articles and books. There was a real buzz about parallel universes among a number of young
physicists.

DAVID DEUTSCH: He was a kind of
star at the conference.

NARRATOR: For shy young
physicist David Deutsch, later to become one of Britain's leading experts in
quantum mechanics, it was a terrific opportunity to learn about the theory from
the original source.

DAVID DEUTSCH: He was deferred
to almost like a star. For instance, I seem to remember that he was smoking,
and no one else was allowed to smoke.

DAVID DEUTSCH: He
certainly seemed to be enjoying the conference. He seemed to be firing on all 6
or 8, or however many it was, cylinders, and was
impressing everybody with the sharpness of his arguments.

NARRATOR: After the
Texas conference, more young physicists embraced Hugh's theory, and parallel
worlds worked their way into popular culture.

Today
the fundamental paradoxes of quantum mechanics remain unresolved, but Hugh's
idea is seen by many physicists as one of several possible explanations.

Unfortunately,
Hugh Everett would see little of this. In 1982, just five
years after the Texas conference, Hugh Everett died of a heart attack, likely helped along by
chain-smoking and hard drinking. He was only 51 years
old. He had worked on his theory for just three years.
The rest of his life had been spent in defense work or
in business.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Those little
tapes that we found in my basement, that were on a strange antique format that we couldn't play, I have now had my team of experts
transfer them. Little bit
nervous, yeah, I don't, just don't know what to expect here.

Well,
let's see what we got. Hmmm. Don't really want to play it...
flipping out. Don't know what to expect here. Well, alright here goes. Male voices, this should be
interesting.

HUGH EVERETT (Recorded):
Oh, you were starting to say some ridiculous things
about the implications of quantum mechanics, and I was having a little fun
joshing you and telling you some of the outrageous implications of what you
said. As we had a little more sherry and got a little further into the
conversation. Oooooohhhh! Okay.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: That got my dad excited. It's weird
hearing him be so talkative, too, because I rarely heard him talk that much.

HUGH EVERETT (Recorded):
And it still feels that way a little bit, even as
recently as last month in Austin, a little bit.

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: Was that last
month in Austin? Wait, then I know when this is.

HUGH EVERETT (Recorded):
...even as recently as last month in Austin, a
little bit...

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: It's interesting
'cause my dad doesn't sound
bitter at all here. And I think he's sort of on a high, because he'd just,
finally, got some recognition. This is, you know, a month after he went on the
trip to Austin, and he said, like, "Oh, you should've
been in Austin."

HUGH EVERETT (Recorded):
Well, there's obviously something wrong here. I
showed the paradoxes and like that and thought they should begin to change it.

INTERVIEWER: You
felt you had to put Johnny on the straight and narrow track?

MARK OLIVER EVERETT: End of this
tape.

It's so weird.
It's weird because it's like the sounds of my house, you know, there. And, man,
it's hard because I...as much as I hate to look back on it all and
everything, I'd also, like, love to be able to be back there just for one night,
maybe, you know?

Various
voices. Duration 21 minutes, 7 seconds. Sounds like a hit to me.

Huh,
I think that's our cat purring. I'm pretty sure. It's funny if that's my dad
recording that, if he's recording the cat purring, I wouldn't be surprised. You
know he did have a thing with animals that was contrary to the way he was with
humans, which I also have, too, it turns out, as you may have noticed.

I
thought I heard a duck. We didn't have a duck.

(Recorded): Hello there, my
name is Mark Everett, and I am very great. And you know it because I am great
and beautiful and superfantastic great. You know that I am
great...da, da, da, da, da. I am great, so great. So great.

(Speaking)I wonder where
my delusions of grandeur came from.

(Speaking)Oh. And then we've
lost power, because it...I told you this was a weird family. We were all clearly
experiments.

(Singing): i'm
turning out just like my father
though i swore i never would
now i can say that i have love for him
i never really understood
what it must have been like for him
living inside his head
i feel like he's here with me now
even though he's dead

(Speaking)I feel like I
know my father a lot better, you know. I feel a lot more connected to him. I
understand more, like, the whole timeline of events, and when he was dreaming
these things up, when he actually did it. And you know, just talking to all
these people that knew him, and it's
interesting, it feels like he is around now, you know, more than I have ever felt. (Thunderclap)

That
was too good. That was, like, good. I mean, that's just going to sound like we
put that in, in sounds effects,
you know, just too perfect.

(Singing): so
in the end i'd like to say
that i'm a very thankful man
i had some regrets
but if i had to do it all again
well, it's something i'd like to do

(Speaking) I
am not a physics genius. I can't even open an umbrella.

You
know, for years, I haven't opened up any of the boxes under my house of my
dad's stuff and everything. And I've known it was coming
eventually, where I was going to
have to because of the mounting interest in him. But now
that I am doing it, I am really glad I am doing it. It feels good. It's such a
genuinely unique experience
to go through. However, I thought still have a little bit of
trepidation about the rest of my life having to be like the ambassador from the
planet Everett, you know.

Had
I known this was coming, I probably wouldn't have even attempted music and
figured, "Well, I'll get girls this way." Then again, the physics guys...not
really the same as rock stars are they? They are, though, in their world, you
know? Like, my dad is a rock star of the physics world, for sure.

Thank
you, ladies and gentlemen.

NARRATOR: On
NOVA's Web site, read original documents written by Hugh Everett, examine the
link between parallel worlds and pop culture and hear where the theory stands
today. Find it on PBS.org.

Major funding
for NOVA is provided by the following:

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And David H.
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